Welcome to our group! Before doing any actual study, you have to do some setup work. It generally takes a week to get this done, so just relax and there is no rush. The steps we need are listed as follows:
Step 1: Gather the appropriate documents and register as an ATLAS user with CERN.
Step 2: Log on to CERN's computing environment (lxplus).
Step 3: Obtaining a GRID Certificate, and import it to both your browser and your lxplus directory.
Step 4: Contact any of our group members to be added to our skype group, our vidyo room and our group website.
CERN Account: After getting the CERN account, you'll be able to get access to logs of CERN resources, including CERN email (@cern.ch), lxplus (some remote linux computers), CERN TWiki (A Wiki for CERN used for record keeping and terminology definition), Vidyo (Video Conference Software), Indico (Conference Schedule, where you can download the slides for the talks), CERN SVN (where you get code from other colleagues and share your code) and so on.
LXPLUS: In our group, we use lxplus for most of the time. By svn commands, you can get the codes you'll work on. By rucio commands, you can look for and download the samples. There are 2 lxplus directories you can see:
user and
work. User directory is your login point, with a maximum storage of 10 GB. You generally store the running codes here. Work directory has a maximum storage of 100 GB, and it's usually used to store samples. You have to manually increase the storage
here, but it's no more difficult than clicking your mouse. There is another file service, called
EOS. You have to ask for it by sending an email to
atlas-support@cern.ch from your CERN email account. A sample email can be asked from any of our group members. Besides, the command line text editors are not easy to use for beginners. So unless you are familiarized with text editors like Emacs, it's recommended to use
Cyberduck.
GRID Certificate: GRID Certificate is very important. Only after you import it onto lxplus can you use rucio commands and doing GRID job.